


come out of books to people orchards

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-15
Updated: 2008-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:30:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jennifer's roommate doesn't much enjoy the idea of having to share her space with someone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come out of books to people orchards

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jenn for betaing.

Jennifer's roommate doesn't much enjoy the idea of having to share her space with someone else—she's Old Money, admitted because her great-grandfather donated enough money to build half the red-brick campus, and her every honeyed syllable makes it clear she resents having to give up valuable nail-polish storage space to make room for Jennifer's bed. Jennifer spends a lot of time in the library, working on assignments and studying and reading books pulled at random from the stacks, telling herself that she's just starting as she means to go on; ignoring the little voice that tells her this isn't just regular old first semester loneliness, that she never goes back to her room or hangs out with her classmates after lectures because she feels like she's coming unmoored here. She's found nothing here yet to anchor her in place: she's younger than everyone else, her body still as gangly and coltish as a teenager, the rounded edges of her Wisconsin accent not yet blunted by time away from home.

Her reading habits grow broader as the weeks go by, and Jennifer takes to alternating medical texts with works on geology or sociology or history, sharp teeth worrying at the skin around her thumbnail while she reads, her legs crossed beneath her on the hard wooden seat. She finds a new place to sit, too, abandoning the brightly-lit ground floor area where the other med students tend to congregate in favour of the top floor. The great mahogany tables up here offer acres of scarred, polished work space but are largely ignored since neither the heating nor the wifi work so well. Jennifer prefers it because it's quiet, and also because... well, let's face it, the mystery guy who is the only other regular user of those tables is hot.

He might be a grad student, she thinks—history, maybe?—because he's nearly always got maps spread out in front of him, so old they're hand-tinted and guide you through empires that don't exist anymore, past cities that have been won and lost and changed their names many times over. He makes a uniform out of casual clothes—his dreads hang down over the back of faded t-shirts that bear slogans for things Jennifer's never heard of; his glasses are thick-framed and as black as his heavy, high-laced boots; his skin looks like it would be hot to the touch, and he has a strangely endearing habit of chewing absentmindedly at the end of his pencil before scribbling a line or two on the yellow legal pad at his elbow.

Nearly every morning, he's there before she is, and she's tempted to walk the few feet over and talk to him: find out his name, what he's searching for in these maps, if he's looking for someplace new in these old books, just like she is. It takes Jennifer a little while to work up her nerve, adding to her store of confidence day by day with glimpses of the mobile curve of his mouth, the strong line of his back under thin cotton, until one Friday she wakes up with the sun and decides this is the day. She makes a special effort in front of the mirror, shaking her hair down from its usual braid and slicking on some lip gloss.

Jennifer's there before him for once, and it doesn't help her nerves; she's staring unseeing at a diagram of kidney function in her textbook when a hand materialises right in front of her holding an extra large styrofoam coffee cup. She looks up, startled, gaze caught between the coffee (he's holding it out to her, and oh god, it smells good, rich and thick like the best Turkish coffee) and him (the corners of his eyes crinkle up when he smiles, and there's a tear's trail of freckles there that she wants to lick).

She manages to say _thank you_, but he doesn't say anything, just leaves the coffee by her elbow and smiles, and strolls over to his usual table with his own cup in his hand. He unfurls his maps while still standing, and Jennifer can see where he's heading for today—the stretch of Arabia, the sickle-curve of the Levant, and foolish thoughts of warm skin and sand between her toes distract her while she bends over her work, and she bites her lip while her cheeks blush hot as the Mediterranean sun.

Around three, she looks up from her work, having become caught up in a particularly tricky case study, and finds he's gone: the lamp at his desk is turned off, the maps folded and stacked neatly in the centre of the table. Jennifer sighs and sits up, wincing when she feels her back crack. Normally she'd stay for longer, but maybe that's enough work for one day; she stands to jam her books and papers into her messenger bag, slides her feet back into her flip flops and heads down the stairwell and towards the door. She's trying to decide between grabbing a sandwich in one of the dining halls on campus, or reheating last night's Chinese takeout, when she's hears a warm rumble of a voice sliding rough-silk over her skin. "Jennifer, right?"

He's leaning against the wall—he must have been waiting for her—and her faithless, clumsy mouth doesn't come out with something smooth, something subtle and flirty like any other woman would be capable of: she opens her mouth and blurts out, "You're not supposed to know my name." He's too kind to laugh at her, but the fine lines around his eyes crinkle up like he wants to, and she knows she must be cherry red, resists the urge to press the backs of her hands against her overheated cheeks.

"Says it on your book bag," he says, nodding at the bag where her name—Jennifer M. Keller—is printed on a name tag that's stitched into the handle.

"Oh." She resists the urge to slide her hand over the incriminating evidence which proves that even now, her mom fusses over the thoughts of her baby girl losing her stuff. "Well, that was... smart of you." _Lame, Jennifer_, she thinks. _That was **lame.**_

His eyes crease up again, but he hitches a shoulder in the direction of the big swinging doors. "Gonna grab dinner in the Gate, you wanna come? There'll be live music later." He sticks his hands into the pockets of his baggy jeans, and on anyone else, Jennifer thinks, it's a gesture that would look like nervousness.

She remembers some article from Cosmopolitan about playing it cool, stringing guys along, read with wide eyes and nerveless fingers back when she was fifteen and the sophistication of college guys had seemed an endless distance away from Chippewa Falls. She remembers something about prevarication being important, and gets as far as saying "I kind of have some stuff to do" before her hind brain grabs what passes for her frontal lobe and shakes it, screaming _what do you think you're doing, this guy is **gorgeous**, he's—_

Jennifer cocks her head. "What _is_ your name?"

He clears his throat a little. "Ronon. Ronon Dex."

She squares her shoulders. "Ronon, I'm Jennifer, and actually I have nothing better to do this evening if you don't count listening to my roommate reminisce about cotillion, and I'm starving, so I'd love to. With you, that is. Dinner."

Her words tumble to an inelegant halt, but he doesn't seem to mind, walking beside her to the Gate, which turns out to be a sort of coffee shop, sort of hang-out place hidden down a side street. Despite the fact that it's out of the way and the other side of town from most places popular with the college crowd, it's near full and obviously colonised by a certain kind of student: the lights are low and the walls painted rich, warm colours; the sofas are mismatched and over-stuffed and the bass-rich music on the stereo has never been in the top 40 of any chart; and one corner is the sole preserve of a group of Ronon's friends who, he tells her, all but live here.

Rodney doesn't say much to her, his attention torn between the enormous panini he's eating and the stack of undergrad physics papers that he has to grade; his boyfriend, who's got a lopsided grin, a shock of dark hair and his feet resting in Rodney's lap, is wryly funny and more than friendly enough to make up for him. Teyla makes reclining in a bean bag look effortless and elegant, and her calm manner hides a wicked wit that she uses to skewer Rodney every time he makes a crack about econ/women's studies joint majors. Opposite her, Sam and Elizabeth are wrapped around one another in an armchair, hands busy enough that Jennifer's almost embarrassed to look at them.

"Don't mind 'em," John says with a grin, "That's just what happens when Elizabeth comes back from a semester abroad, every time," before he ducks the cushion that Sam flings at his head with frightening accuracy.

They all seem to know who she is, and Jennifer's just about to start worrying whether that's a good or a bad thing when Ronon returns from the counter bearing a tray piled high with food and drink—coffees that the others pounce on; a huge sandwich and a bowl of steaming hot lentil soup apiece for him and her. It smells wonderful, and it must taste good because Rodney deigns to look up from his work and say that it's acceptable enough, for vegetarian food; when she swallows her first mouthful, it settles warm and filling in the pit of her stomach.

The conversation flows fast around her while she eats, almost bewilderingly so with its references to places she's never been and people she's not met—Carson might be around later; Ronon's plans for his newest book (because it turns out he's not a grad student, he's the founder of the new Barefoot series of themed travel guides which is outselling _Lonely Planet_ and the Middle East is his next stop); no, Aiden's not getting back from his parents' place til next week; have you _heard_ what Vala got up to with Daniel last week? in public? the faculty are up in arms; but Jenn, you should meet Vala, you'll like her; no, she won't, she's an over-sexed kook—but all of them are more than willing to include her in it, bring her up to speed and ask her opinion, find out who she is and what she's studying and whether or not she agrees with John that Rodney's striped button-down shirt is truly hideous.

Ronon provides explanation now and then, words murmured low in her ear; his huff of laughter stirs the hair against her ear when she squeaks on hearing the truth behind the Noodle Incident, and she feels brave and silly and contented when she leans back against him, his arm slipping around her shoulder.

Jennifer's a little startled when she realises that she's only known his name a couple of hours, met the others not long after, and yet this is the most she's spoken outside the classroom since she got here—startled to think that there are no other people on campus who know that she misses her grandma's pecan pie something fierce, or that she once broke her leg playing at Olympic gymnasts with Laurie Nielsen on the wooden bridge over the old creek. She was so unknown here that not one soul knew the kinds of things about her that defined her back in Chippewa Falls, and yet recognition was always here for her to find: two blocks down and one over, at the back of a ramshackle coffee shop, with Elizabeth shaking her head and laughing and saying oh no, no, try growing up in Nebraska, because there...

The open mic begins at seven thirty; Teyla picks up a guitar from behind the couch and moves to sit cross-legged on a stool set in the middle of the tiny stage. She picks out quiet, melodic songs in a language Jennifer doesn't know, but which ease something that's been clenched tight inside her chest; it's a magic everyone else in the shop seems to recognise, with John getting Rodney to put down his work and listen, while Sam and Elizabeth rest blonde head against dark peaceably and drift.

Jennifer turns to Ronon midway through the set to say—she actually can't remember what, later; perhaps to say that she liked the melody, or that the rhythm of the lyrics reminded her of a poem her grandma used to recite, or simply just that in that moment, she felt happy. But he was closer to her than he realised, his face right there when she turned to look at him, so close that she could only focus on the particularities of him, not on the whole: first on the curve of his mouth, then on those three well-studied freckles that traced the line of his cheek bones, then the warm hazel of his eyes behind their glasses.

She thinks, well, okay, she's training as a doctor, she's learning to make a diagnosis, to see if reality follows hypothesis, and there's possibly a little hysteria to her thinking _Physician, heal thyself_. Jennifer leans in, hesitant, watching all the time to see if he'll pull back, to see if she's misread this; but his lips are smiling when they meet hers, his palm roughened but gentle when it curves around her cheek so that his fingers can tangle in her hair.

It feels like they kiss for the length of all the endless time that flows through and around the notes of Teyla's music: until Jennifer's heart is a metronome keeping perfect time with the rhythm of the notes, with the way he curls a lock of her hair around one finger, over and over. Dimly, she can feel her toes curling against the rubber soles of her flip flops, and she's humming with the feel of him pressed warm against her.

"Hey," she says, when he finally pulls away, feeling the way her lips curve in a smile wide enough to match his, ignoring the way someone from the couch next to them — John, she thinks vaguely — lets loose an obnoxious wolf-whistle.

"Hi," Ronon says, and lets his hand drop from his hair, trails his fingertips the length of her neck so that Jennifer shivers at the warmth of his touch, "You know you touch your neck like this when you're studying?"

"N-no," she replies, staring at him wide-eyed before she blinks. "You watch me?"

"Sometimes. More, lately. You..."

"Oh," Jennifer says, then "_Oh_" when she sees how his eyes darken when he looks at her, open and wanting.

"Maybe," she says, feeling her fingertips twine in his t-shirt, thrilling at the feel of hard muscle underneath, at the thought that she could have this, "Maybe tomorrow we can share a table?"

"Nuh uh," Ronon says, but Jennifer has only time to jump a little in shocked disappointment before he turns his head to whisper in her ear: to tell her all the hidden nooks he knows about in the stacks, the places where the close press of millions of words all around you give room for your imagination, give names to all your possibilities and show you how to speak.


End file.
